The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston
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of those condemned to the makeshift camps in southern France was never fully reported in the centre-south zone. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of rumours, together with some reliable information and considerable exaggeration. It all fed the fears of the already exhausted, starving and demoralized population. The sense that a similar fate awaited them led to a widespread hope that someone in authority would appeal to the other side for a negotiated peace. For some at least, in the eloquent phrase of Ángel Bahamonde, ‘The psychology of defeat led to an acceptance of blame, the confession of sin and the payment of repentance, sieved through the imagined forgiveness of our brothers on the other side.’3 In fact, many hundreds of thousands of Republicans expected nothing of ‘brothers on the other side’. They knew only too well what Franco’s clemency and justice meant. They were those who would flee en masse to the coast at the end of March 1939 in the vain hope of evacuation. Yet they too longed for an end to the war. In fact, for two reasons, there would be virtually no more fighting in the centre zone. On the one hand, Franco needed time to reorganize his forces after the titanic effort involved in the Catalan campaign. On the other, he had confidence that the treachery of Casado, Matallana and other pro-rebel officers would bring down the Republic without further military effort on his part.
Palmiro Togliatti, the senior Comintern representative in Spain, later reported to Moscow on the situation after the loss of Catalonia: ‘The great majority of political and military leaders had lost all confidence in the possibility of continued resistance. There was a general conviction that the army of the central zone could not repel an enemy attack because of their overwhelming numerical superiority and because of our lack of weaponry, aircraft and transport, and its organic weakness.’ Many professional officers, including the Communist ones, with the sole exception of Francisco Ciutat, believed that prolonged resistance was impossible. Colonel Antonio Cordón, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, the recently promoted General Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, the chief of the air force, and Colonel Carlos Núñez Maza, the under-secretary of air, all career officers but also members of the Communist Party, told Togliatti ‘openly’ that they did not believe resistance was possible in the centre zone unless the men and weapons taken into France could be returned to Spain. In his report to Moscow, Togliatti wrote: ‘I also believe that the conviction that further resistance was impossible was also quite widespread among the officers who had risen from the ranks of the militia. The same belief was also unanimous among the cadres of the Anarchists and of the Republican and Socialist parties, and in the police and state apparatus. Accordingly, the problem was no longer how to organize resistance, but how to end the war “with honour and dignity”.’ There were divergent opinions on how to do this. However, the one point on which there was widespread agreement was that the Communists were the ‘sole obstacle’ to ending the war. By smearing the Communists as ‘the enemies of peace’, the defeatists had found a way of channelling the war-weariness and fear of the masses. Togliatti saw this slogan as the ‘cement’ that united the disparate elements of the non-Communist left. At least retrospectively, he believed that Negrín himself had ‘no faith in the possibility of further resistance’.4
The most visceral hostility to the Republican government was to be found in the anarchist movement. This derived in part from the bitter resentment of many anarchists about the way in which the libertarian desire for a revolutionary war had been crushed in the first half of 1937 in the interests of a more realistic centralized war effort. However, the anarchists had also been on the receiving end of extremely harsh treatment by the Communist-dominated security services because of the ease with which the CNT–FAI could be infiltrated by the Fifth Column. The Republican press, Communist, Socialist and Left Republican, frequently published accusations about Fifth Column networks that functioned on the basis of using CNT membership cards.5 The crack security units known as the Brigadas Especiales were focused on the detention, interrogation and, sometimes, elimination of suspicious elements. This meant not only Francoists but also members of the Madrid CNT. The Communist José Cazorla, who in December 1936 succeeded Santiago Carrillo as the Counsellor for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa de Madrid, believed the CNT to be out of control and infiltrated by agents provocateurs of the Fifth Column.6 The Communist press demanded strong measures against these uncontrolled elements and those who protected them, calling for the annihilation of the agents provocateurs who were described as ‘new dynamiters’, a term intended to invoke echoes of anarchist terrorists of earlier times.7 The presence of Fifth Columnists was perhaps to be expected in an officer corps of the armed forces largely made up of career officers who sympathized with their erstwhile comrades of the other side. However, infiltration of one-time militia units could also be found. Cazorla investigated Fifth Columnist infiltration of the ineffective secret services (Servicios Secretos de Guerra) run in the Ministry of Defence by the CNT’s Manuel Salgado Moreira. Shortly before the dissolution of the Junta de Defensa by Largo Caballero, on 14 April 1937, José Cazorla announced that an important spy-ring in the Republican Army had been dismantled. Among those arrested was Alfonso López de Letona, a Fifth Columnist who had reached a high rank in the general staff of the 14th Division of the People’s Army, commanded by the anarchist Cipriano Mera. López de Letona had become a senior member of Manuel Salgado’s staff on the basis of a recommendation by Mera’s chief of staff, Antonio Verardini Díez de Ferreti.8
The belief that the anarchist movement was infested with Fifth Columnists was not confined to the Communists. Largo Caballero told PSOE executive committee member Juan-Simeón Vidarte that ‘the FAI has been infiltrated by so many agents provocateurs and police informers that it is impossible to have dealings with them’. That view was shared by the Socialist Director General de Seguridad, Largo Caballero’s friend Wenceslao Carrillo. One of José García Pradas’s collaborators in the CNT–FAI newspaper Frente Libertario was the prominent Fifth Columnist Antonio Bouthelier España, who also held the position of secretary to Manuel Salgado.9 The easy acquisition of CNT membership cards provided the Fifth Column with access to information, an instrument for acts of provocation and relative ease of movement. Once equipped with CNT accreditation, Fifth Columnists could also get identity cards for the Republican security services.10
While Negrín was still in Catalonia, the anarchist movement initiated contacts with the generals who were also being sounded out by Casado. On 1 February 1939 the secretaries of the three principal anarchist organizations, the CNT, the FAI and the anarchist youth movement, the Federación de Juventudes Libertarias, jointly sent an obsequious letter to General Miaja. They suggested that they create for him an organization uniting all anti-fascist forces in the centre-south zone, insinuating that it exclude the Communists. Over the next three days, the anarchists held meetings with Miaja, Matallana and Menéndez. Since all three generals were already conspiring with Casado, it is reasonable to suppose that areas of mutual interest were sketched out. According to the anarchist chronicler José Peirats, in the meeting with the anarchists Miaja declared that the Communists intended to impose a one-party government led by Vicente Uribe. There was no truth in the claim – it merely reflected what Casado had told Miaja earlier on the same day.11
In the wake of these anarchist initiatives, three senior figures of the libertarian movement of the centre-south zone were sent on a mission to try to secure a coordinated response of the CNT and FAI to the deteriorating military situation. Juan López Sánchez, who had been Minister of Commerce in the government of Largo Caballero, Manuel Amil, secretary of the CNT’s Federación Nacional del Transporte, and Eduardo Val Bescós, seen as the most powerful figure in the anarchist movement in Madrid, had left for Catalonia in the early morning of Sunday 5 February, ten days after the Francoist capture of Barcelona. Their purpose was to make contact with the CNT’s National Committee to discuss the situation after the expected loss of Catalonia. Their aircraft, unable to land in Catalonia, where Figueras was about to fall, took them to Toulouse. In contrast to the silent Val, the tall and brawny Manuel Amil was a loquacious raconteur. They were trapped